begun to raise yet.... How're the hosses comin' on?"

"Grand, sir--grand!" exclaimed the simple Joel. "Peg is runnin' faster
than last year, but Blue Roan is leavin' her a mile. Dad's goin' to bet
all he has. The roan can't lose this year."

Bostil felt like a bull bayed at by a hound. Blue Roan was a young
horse, and every season he had grown bigger and faster. The King had
reached the limit of his speed. That was great, Bostil knew, and enough
to win over any horse in the uplands, providing the luck of the race
fell even. Luck, however, was a fickle thing.

"I was advisin' Dad to swim the hosses over," declared Joel,
deliberately.

"A-huh! You was? ... An' why?" rejoined Bostil.

Joel's simplicity and frankness vanished, and with them his
rationality. He looked queer. His contrasting eyes shot little
malignant gleams. He muttered incoherently, and moved back toward the
skiff, making violent gestures, and his muttering grew to shouting,
though still incoherent. He got in the boat and started to row back
over the river.

"Sure he's got a screw loose," observed Somers. Shugrue tapped his
grizzled head significantly.

Bostil made no comment. He strode away from his men down to the river
shore, and, finding a seat on a stone, he studied the slow eddying red
current of the river and he listened. If any man knew the strange and
remorseless Colorado, that man was Bostil. He never made any mistakes
in anticipating what the river was going to do.

And now he listened, as if indeed the sullen, low roar, the murmuring
hollow gurgle, the sudden strange splash, were spoken words meant for
his ears alone. The river was low. It seemed tired out. It was a dirty
red in color, and it swirled and flowed along lingeringly. At times the
current was almost imperceptible; and then again it moved at varying
speed. It seemed a petulant, waiting, yet inevitable stream, with some
remorseless end before it. It had a thousand voices, but not the one
Bostil listened to hear.

He plodded gloomily up the trail, resting in the quiet, dark places of
the canyon, loath to climb out into the clear light of day. And once in
the village, Bostil shook himself as if to cast off an evil,
ever-present, pressing spell.

The races were now only a few days off. Piutes and Navajos were camped
out on the sage, and hourly the number grew as more came in. They were
building cedar sunshades. Columns of blue smoke curled up here and
there. Mustangs and po